About The Old Weird:

In 1987, Griel Marcus wrote an amazing book called Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes. It was about the creation and cultural importance of Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes, the most famous bootleg recording, even before there were bootleg recordings. It had been released as an album, but what appeared on the release was only a fragment of the total recordings. They would leak out, one or two at a time, for decades until 2014 when everything was made available on a 6-CD set. The original recordings themselves were recorded over a series of months in 1967-1968 while Dylan was recovering from a motorcycle accident. He and several members of what would soon be “The Band,” recorded over 100 songs - some originals, lots of traditional standards, and a lot of covers from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, an album released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952, from a collection of recordings made from 1927-1932. This Anthology of American Folk Music became a touchstone for the arts and artists of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those interested in what is now called Americana, but didn't really have a name back then.

Griel Marcus, in Invisible Republic, called this world captured in the recordings, “the old, weird America.” The publishers liked this phrase enough that the paperback was renamed from Invisible Republic to The Old, Weird America when it was reissued in 2011.